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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

> Or, they'd give up on EME because all the major platforms were hostile to it and it provides them no defensible value.

That's absurd. Netflix would sooner stop supporting web browsers on desktop OS's before they started allowing DRM-free streaming. Regardless of your own view on DRM, Netflix's licenses to the content they provide almost certainly requires the use of DRM, and the companies that own the content would never be willing to relicense them for DRM-free streaming.

Without EME, Netflix would be relying on proprietary browser plugins forever, and if a platform with a significant userbase appeared that didn't support any form of proprietary plugin, and they wanted to support that platform, they'd develop their own proprietary application for it instead of providing DRM-free streaming (think of how Netflix has applications for mobile OS's and even consoles, both living room consoles and handheld consoles).

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> the companies that own the content would never be willing to relicense them for DRM-free streaming.

Don't be so sure. People were saying exactly this several years ago about music. We owe it to Jobs that he realized it's stupid idea, and put an end to it.

> they'd develop their own proprietary application for it instead of providing DRM-free streaming (think of how Netflix has applications for mobile OS's and even consoles, both living room consoles and handheld consoles).

That seems better to me, than poisoning a whole standard just to get their way, or the highway.

That's purchased music.

You don't rent out stuff and let people keep it after they stop renting.

> That seems better to me, than poisoning a whole standard just to get their way, or the highway.

The open web has been losing a lot of traction to a closed competitor on iOS and Android. Businesses in China are on WeChat long before they are on the web. Giving up streamed music and video completely to apps would damage the world wide web immensely by shifting more user to over to closed app systems. The web would go the way of the newsgroup.

> The open web has been losing a lot of traction to a closed competitor on iOS and Android.

The open web lost a lot of traction to a closed competitor when it integrated EME.

Your argument here is basically "companies won't use the open web, so we shouldn't have an open web".

"We owe it to Jobs that he realized it's stupid idea, and put an end to it."

Don't buy into this nonsense Jobs sainthood. He was a person who went whichever way the wind was blowing.

> Don't be so sure. People were saying exactly this several years ago about music.

Music and video have always been very different markets. Among other things, music has always been available in high quality form without DRM (on CDs). And the consumer habits around music are different than those of video. And as wodenkoto said, we're talking here about streaming video, not purchased music

Does support for plugins poison web standards?

>Without EME, Netflix would be relying on proprietary browser plugins forever

And they should! They distribute proprietary software, so they should be able to deal with relying on other proprietary software.

This idea that we must sacrifice the ideology of the web for the benefit of large corporations like Netflix is completely insane.

The idea that the existence of EME somehow destroys the rest of the web is completely insane. Remember, NPAPI is a web standard, so we've already had the existence of closed-source proprietary binary blobs as part of web standards for many years. EME is a huge step forward.

> That's absurd. Netflix would sooner stop supporting web browsers on desktop OS's before they started allowing DRM-free streaming.

So let them, and let a competitor arise that allows a similar service with DRM-free streaming. That's what the free market is for. I'm not sure why implementers of the open web should care about Netflix's concerns.

> Without EME, Netflix would be relying on proprietary browser plugins forever, and if a platform with a significant userbase appeared that didn't support any form of proprietary plugin, and they wanted to support that platform, they'd develop their own proprietary application for it instead of providing DRM-free streaming (think of how Netflix has applications for mobile OS's and even consoles, both living room consoles and handheld consoles).

So let them do that and suffer the consequences of the inferior user experience that would provide.

What makes you think it's even possible for a competitor to arise with DRM-free streaming?

The reason you don't see any DRM-free video streaming of non-independent content is because the content producers require DRM. They won't license their content without it. It's quite literally not possible for a DRM-free Netflix competitor to arise, because they'd have no content (or at least, no content worth watching).

The content producers, not the distributor Netflix, insist on DRM. If Netflix is streaming the same content to a native application instead of a browser, they will have the same DRM requirements.

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